1.
They have come to preach
poetry on street corners, stealing
apple-gloss skies for a smile and
borrowing marshmallow nights
with their star-draped nets.

So often have they erased the past
we might believe
they are discovering
stories that have always existed,
making them heard for the first time
believing they are happening only now.

It’s fortunate that the language of the universe
is infinitely renewable and endless
like air or rain
on the cusp of memory.

Land-dwellers and sky-tossed
magicians who ripen the earth
while each of us can heft moon, star,
hope with the ease of a word,
simply spin joy into a whispering foam,
sandbars all the way to the horizon
whose hollow holds a shared imagining
with their would-be reader.

They are only longing to spin thought
into song
and hearts on their axis.
So the tune spills out
rushing like the globe’s unending light
rising like verb whose infinite syllables
strike the mind with each rotation
offering a new glimpse of a hidden world.

Even if somewhere an endless library
has already collected this
before it formed
on a porous skin of cellophane,
everlasting and invisible.

Everything is something already said
in the moments between words

and still the sky need only touch its ink
to shapes dull against the dawn
until the firmament pulses with light.

2.
That’s how the poets stand, waiting
rapturous and dazzling as the wind does
its trick where you somehow feel
the soft print of its fingers
more in the ebb-calm
and the day lives itself out

until night arrives blossoming
its million lantern tricks.
When it turns grey in the hush, fades
for the slow drift of myth must pour out its wax
making a quiet marvel
of the bounteous, glass-blown sky.

Palate of silver winds and shades too slow
to tame the stretching vectors,
birds we scrape words across, like Zeno
inventing a puzzle of the entrancing sky,
draining its unclenchable mystery.

Until even in the woods of thought
under the wide-brimmed canopy of metaphor,
conversations become homonyms
for each other.

Inhabiting that small cabin of quiet history,
pursued by the flushing snow
of restless thoughts tilling rooftops,
with the morning carving its diminuendo
a familiar shape of day
whirring everything into the self-same shape.

To be otherwise, to be other
in words to step
beyond mere echo of that forest
outside these walls.

Voices I have read before, I shelter under
your steady frame, dreaming instead
how new colours will slide out across the tongue of time,
how leaves will split across their horizons,
spilling out new verbs
that we can taste the unmade universe.

No more than this, much more
we twist to escape the comfort
of everything we have already read,
and steady paths known by ripe grass
that swoops and waves and tells
without knowing why,
other than that it must.